Tezos (XTZ)
Basics * "Tezos plans to compete with the existing blockchains by offering a higher security through a technique of formal verification, and a self-amending protocol which will facilitate automatic amendments of protocol without a need for a hard fork. The project has been under development since 2014, and the team planned to launch the network in 4 months after ICO, which was in 7-2017. It launched in September 2018. Using the original source code which was released in 2016 Tezos launched an alphanet in Feb. 2017 prior to their July token sale. While the network was originally planned for a late 2017 launch the betanet did not go live until June 2018 due to disagreements within the foundation which delayed the release of funds to developers. The code was released under open source license. The network token XTZ or Tez that was offered for sale is needed to power smart contracts and to participate in voting." * “Tezos is its own blockchain, not a derivative of any other blockchain. We didn’t just fork Bitcoin or Ethereum and add a layer onto it. We built our own from the ground up.” * "Tezos has the potential to cover all key use cases of Ethereum offering extra security as a bonus. At the same time, the cost of using Tezos is expected to be higher than that of Ethereum. It means that Tezos is likely to be in demand in cases where high security need dominates. At the same time, there will always be lots of markets where security offered by Ethereum is enough." Check this reddit thread to get deeper into this topic. * From Our Network #6 (30-1-2020): "Funded accounts on Tezos continued to grow by +7% (+24k) throughout January, but the number of economically relevant accounts with more than 100tz balance increased only by 938 to 24.6k, which represents 6.6% of all 376k funded accounts. Overall, the top 1k accounts hold about 67% of total supply which is close to Litecoin (64%) but much higher than Bitcoin (35%)." ICO * Tezos conducted an ICO from June 28, 2017 to July 13, 2017, in which 65,681 BTC and 361,122 ETH were raised. In return, 607,489,040 XTZ allocated for ICO participants were created at genesis. On top of the initial genesis supply, an additional ~76.3 million XTZ will be created for the Tezos Foundation and DLS (Dynamic Ledger Solutions). The XTZ that will be created and allocated to the Foundation and DLS is subject to a 4-year vesting schedule with monthly cliffs. This will create an aggregate allocated supply of 763,306,929 XTZ. * Development team: $317,000 worth of XTZ in addition to their regular compensation * Advisors: $75,000 worth of XTZ * PR consulting firm: $30,000 worth of XTZ * The ICO set a record for the largest initial coin offering (ICO) of all time up that point – $232 million in July 2017. * "Controversially, only investors who provided personal information to TokenSoft, a third-party provider contracted by the foundation, were able to claim their tokens. The foundation did not announce that it would carry out these know-your-customer and anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) checks – which required investors to submit names, phone numbers, addresses, government-issued IDs and selfies – until nearly a year after the ICO, in which the foundation accepted bitcoin and ether." Tech Consensus algorithm * Liquid Proof-of-Stake (LPoS) protocol. “In Liquid Proof-of-Stake (LPoS) protocols such as Tezos only the baker is directly punished in case of a fault" * From Messari: "At the core of this codebase is a system to formalize proposing, voting for, and implementing changes to the functionality of the network. Once a proposal has been made holders of Tezos (XTZ) tokens are able to vote with a weighting of one vote per token. Consensus is determined using a version of a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system where stakers, called bakers within the network, can lock up their tokens in exchange for the ability to validate blocks. In Tezo's more liquid DPoS system users are able to "delegate" tokens to bakers without transferring ownership. Rewards for validating blocks are distributed to bakers in the form of new XTZ tokens with a proportional amount of the reward distributed to wallets that have delegated tokens to the baker. This enables smaller token holders to participate in the validation (and reward) process if they hold less than the required amount to become a full baker. Using this model the team believes they can increase participation from token holders by reducing frictions and allowing anyone to receive newly released XTZ to maintain the relative value of their holdings. To allow for future changes to the network Tezos is divided into network, transaction, and consensus protocols. The transaction and consensus protocols operate separately and plug into a generic network shell. This shell maintains the current state of the blockchain and allows the network to conduct internal checks on the protocols allowing them to validate their own replacements. Proposed changes can be made by anyone and are decided on by a vote from token holders. Proposals can include a payment to be made by the developer proposing a change which the team believes will incentive more impactful development on the platform." * The developers made a unique choice to use OCaml as the programming language arguing that it offers better security features and is a more powerful interface compared to other options like C++. OCaml also allows developers to check operations using formal verification which can detect potential bugs or errors in the code. Staking * In Tezos, blocks are created through a process known as ‘baking.’ Each block is produced (“baked”) by a random stakeholder and notarized (“endorsed”) by 32 other random stakeholders. This is essentially the same as staking, but it’s only open to network nodes with more than 10,000 XTZ. For each block created, a delegate can earn a 16 XTZ reward – roughly $15.5 at current prices. * Tezos users with smaller holdings can still participate by nominating a delegate to bake on their behalf. The delegate does not own or control the tokens in any way. In particular, it cannot spend them. However, if and when one of these tokens is randomly selected to bake a block, that right will belong to the delegate. A proposed protocol upgrade suggests decreasing the minimum from 10,0000 to stake to 8,000 XTZ, allowing more XTZ holders to bake independently. This update is expected to go live sometime in late May. (April 10, 2019) * Tezos is now (10-4-2019) one of the most-staked digital assets, with users currently baking $495M worth of XTZ tokens, or 75% of the circulating supply. Some of the delegated bakers close shop but continue collecting rewards (17-12-2019); "at present a huge amount of tez are delegated to closed and dead bakers." '' * Update (30-1-2020) from Our Network on staking: ''"Custodial staking continued to gain traction in Tezos. Throughout January 2020 staked balances at exchanges increased by +1.3% (26M) to 14% (89M) of all staked coins. Staking participation overall increased by +18M to a new ATH of 77.3% (635M). At the same time staking yield dropped to an all-time-low of 1.48% above inflation. Despite diminishing yield the number of consensus participants (bakers) remains relatively stable at around 430. We show unique roll owners here because Tezos assigns validation & voting rights based on rolls with one roll equal to 8000 tez. About 50% (207) of all validators are self-baking entities, meaning they have <= 1 incoming delegation. 160 of them own less than 100k tez in staking balance, 10 self-bakers are whales with balances between 1-5M tez. Although the amount of unique validators is high (430) the distribution of their weight tells a slightly different story. 50+% of Tezos staking is controlled by only 9 different entities while the top 100 bakers control 92% of the network. The largest entity (the Tezos Foundation) validates 27% of all blocks, the next largest are Coinbase (5.84%), Polychain (4.42%) and Cryptium Labs (3.62%), Binance (3.16%), Kraken (1.96%), P2P Validator (1.93%), Airfoil (1.72%) and FlippinTacos (1.71%). This is not troubling for consensus since rights are assigned randomly, but it plays a relevant role in governance. The foundation and some of the large bakers have historically abstained from voting. With the rise of custodial staking exchanges suddenly find themselves under pressure by the community to vote and build tools to let their delegators contribute." Smart Contracts * With the new Fi, smart contracts can be developed on Tezos. Fi is a ECMA/Javascript/Solidity like language that is statically typed and compiles down to valid Michelson code. * From Our Network #6 (30-1-2020): "Adoption: Smart contract usage on Tezos mainnet has not picked up speed yet. Throughout January mainnet has seen a meager 55 new contracts and 3.5k contract calls, the most prominent deployed contract has been StakerDAO. The real action in Tezos still happens on various testnets hinting at a quickly growing developer base. The most active one is Babylonnet which has seen an all-time high in deployed contracts 4,647 (+1,456 from Jan 1st) and an unprecedented growth in smart contract calls (+62k since Jan 1st which is a 2.6x growth in one single month)." * For whatever reason, Tezos did not respond when Bitcoin.com did a 2019 check-up on smart contract projects. Other projects mentioned in the article were EOS, Tron, RSK and Matic, which presumedly all did respond. * From Proof of Work 75 (28-9-2019): "Check out the new website from Edukera and learn how Archetype helps to develop smarter Smart Contracts on Tezos. Archetype is a domain-specific language to develop Smart Contracts on the Tezos blockchain, with a specific focus on contract security." Assets * Assets on Tezos; A proposal for a standard interface for creating and managing fungible assets using smart-contracts on Tezos. The newly proposed asset interface standard is similar to ERC-20, with the upcoming reference implementation allowing developers to specify a third party manager of the asset contract (eg a STO, a DAO or multisig) as well as soon having formally verified properties. * "TQ Tezos, Nomadic Labs, and Serokell are jointly working on proposing a standard interface for creating and managing fungible assets using smart-contracts on Tezos. Serokell has already produced an example implementation. The initial interface follows ERC-20 closely, as the standard is well known and widely used by third parties (wallets, exchanges), and familiar to developers. Engineers at Nomadic Labs and Serokell are also developing alternatives inspired by other emerging standards, such as ERC-777 and ERC-1155." Voting * Jacob Arluck from of the teams working on Tezos said this about Tezos governance: "We want to be conservative and keep consensus around changes to the protocol, but stay fast moving and not stuck like Bitcoin. You want to start conservative and loosen up along the way, trying not to lose decentralization." * Voting on on-chain governance happens in three phases. It takes 3 months, every month 1 vote. * Voting rights for the top 10 BPs on Tezos is currently at 28.8% (as of April 13th, 2019) * On the question if Tezos with it's delegated proof of stake might end up with cartels (like Lisk): "On this topic, there’s no shortage of celebrated blog posts forewarning us that on-chain governance is destined for capture by concentrated interests. And there is real evidence to this effect in Lisk. But observers too often extrapolate the experiences of dPOS protocols with fixed size validator sets directly onto Tezos. Rarely do observers note that Tezos features a different model based on different priorities. None of this is to say that powerful voting coalitions can’t arise, or that large entities, like exchanges, won’t become important stakeholders in Tezos. But what matters most is whether token holders and users can coordinate to rearrange power and hold concentrated interests accountable. Liquid Proof-of-Stake should facilitate this by ensuring the barrier to entry is low enough to maintain a dynamic validator set." * At the end of 2018 one subreddit user pointed out that users were 'over-delegating': "The over-delegation problem is getting ugly. At Tezos Community, we stopped accepting new KT1 addresses for delegation way back in cycle 26. But as of today, we have 158 delegators with over 1M of new delegations made to us since then. These delegators are not receiving rewards from us - but they still count towards our staking balance. This means that we are more likely to become over-delegated despite our best efforts to mitigate the risk. I feel bad for these delegators because there is no good way to notify them of their mistake. One of the protocol improvements we need to consider is a way for a baker to stop accepting new delegators. As many bakers become over delegated, the chain will become impacted. As a threat to decentralization, our largest bakers (TF, Polychain, and presumably Draper) will start to earn many steals. Because they bake for themselves, they have lots of bond available to pick up all the steals that the public delegation services will miss. This crisis is going to come to a head over the next 15 cycles." However it seemed to have worked itself out by as one reddit user put it (29-9-2019): "Education and information. People eventually figured out they wouldn't get anything if they delegated to an overdelegated baker, and baker who found themselves with unwanted delegation managed ways to get more bonds and profit from the unexpected bounty." * The Tezos upgrade proposal, Athens, has successfully been implemented on the Tezos Protocol autonomously. "The implementation has proven that Tezos can upgrade to new protocol changes in an automated, decentralized, and self-funded manner. Nomadic Labs proposal attached a 100 XTZ invoice which the protocol automatically minted and distributed after successfully implementing the protocol change. This exercise enables any developer to submit a proposal with their own invoice attached to the proposal." * TzStats has launched (10-2019) a Tezos Babylon testnet, Babylon is the current tezos upgrade proposal. Update: the update after Babylon has been approved, called Cartgagenet and testnet has started (13-12-2019). Projects building on Tezos * StakerDAO (launched on Tezos early January 2020) * DEXter is a Uniswap-like DEX built on Tezos. (7-2019). Even though there are not many assets live on Tezos yet, the infrastructure is being built. * Latin American bank BTG Pactual and asset manager Dalma Capital announced that they will be using the Tezos blockchain to launch security token offerings (STOs). The banks said the deal will be worth well over $1 billion when all existing and prospective token issuances are completed. * Sona is a proposed idea to develop a decentralized, self-sovereign identity deployed on the Tezos protocol. Sona will encompass identity verification, on-chain relationship management, private data storage and wallet management with a method to recover your identity if a private key is compromised or lost. * "Andra Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, has announced (22-1-2020) its own token: Silicon Valley Coin (SVC). The company plans to issue it via a security token offering (STO) in collaboration with Tezos Foundation and TokenSoft. SVC will be built on the Tezos blockchain and utilize TokenSoft’s issuance platform. The fund will use it to invest in late-stage technology companies." * Madfish Solutions published (4-2-2020) an article about QuipuSwap, a decentralized token exchange on Tezos. Projects from ETH to Tezos * Vertalo moved (28-1-2020) from Ethereum to Tezos. * Securitize can be used (2-2020) to launch a security token on Tezos. "Securitize and Elevated Returns have collaborated (15-9-2019) to transition Aspencoin— a security token representing property ownership— to the Tezos blockchain. Both parties claim that with high valued assets already in the pipeline, the collaboration will result in $1 billion worth of tokenized assets. After a reported valuation of $18 million, Aspencoin recently switched to Securitize and their Digital Security (DS) Protocol. Securitize is a compliance platform for digital securities, which aims to ensure regulatory compliance for the life-cycle of digital assets. Now, Aspencoin is transitioning from Ethereum to the Tezos blockchain." Issues * The Tezos name was once synonymous with drama. A boardroom dispute, protracted ICO token lock-up and regulatory issues meant that when the mainnet finally launched last summer (9-2018), most investors dumped their holdings on the open market. Prices more than halved from $4 to $ 1.60. * As this tweet summed it up: # Foundation struggles # Failed Dune fork # Spam attacks # Class-action lawsuit # Failed TzLibre fork But still standing (7-2019). TzLibre & nTezos forks (2018) * From this CoinDesk article: "The delay between the the ICO and the platform’s launch is largely due to a conflict that pitted Tezos’ founders, Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, against Johann Gevers, former president of the Tezos Foundation. While the Breitmans controlled the code through DLS, Gevers controlled the funds. The standoff ended when Gevers stepped down in February, but the platform still did not launch immediately. The foundation’s decision to conduct KYC/AML checks may indicate that legal and regulatory uncertainties stood in the way. The Breitmans, Dynamic Ledger Solutions, the Tezos Foundation and others associated with the project have been sued at least four times between them. Investors have aired their grievances on a technical as well as a legal front. At least two groups of developers have announced plans to create alternate versions of Tezos and to dispense with aspects of the platform they don’t like, such as KYC and awards of pre-mined tokens to the foundation. TzLibre announced the day after Gevers stepped down that it would launch its own version of the Tezos protocol. Another project, nTezos, emerged in response to the Tezos Foundation’s KYC announcement. Both alternate Tezos implementations’ teams are pseudonymous." Dune Fork (2019) * From this post by The Block: "French engineering group, OcamlPro, is pursuing a Tezos fork after the token's managing foundation threatened to stop funding them over governance concerns, according to a blog post by the Tezos Commons Foundation. OcamlPro's leadership is said to have partnered with a newly registered crypto fund, Starchain Capital, in order to fork Tezos and to create a new blockchain called Dune Protocol. According to a leaked email allegedly sent by Starchain Capital, it is currently creating an SPV to raise $1m for 5% of the total token supply to fund the operations. The fork is scheduled for September 2019. OCamlPro had been receiving funding from the Tezos Foundation as part of their grant program, working on Tezos-related projects such as Liquidity and its block explorer, TzScan. However, tensions began to arise after it emerged OCamlPro was not fully open-sourcing its software, which is one of the conditions for financing grantees. The Tezos Foundation made it known that the funding, which expired in Q2 of this year, would be halted unless this criteria was met. The Tezos protocol has been lauded as a solution to solve proposal disputes through its on-chain governance mechanism. However its software is open source, meaning anyone can fork from it." * From a blog post Tezos Commons Foundation: "During this period numerous debates arose in the Tezos Community surrounding TzScan and Liquidity’s licensing agreement. OCamlPro leadership started publicly accusing the Tezos Foundation of ‘blacklisting’ them from their grant program. They appear to have purposefully stirred the community over the fear of Liquidity to be a paid licensed product, and not free or open source. The reasoning given was they had not received further grants to support their development. They received grants in the past, and were in at that time in negotiation regarding future grants with the Tezos Foundation, but the reasoning as to why they had not been approved remained a mystery to the broader community. A segment of the community sided with OCamlPro without knowing the full context. This sparked a large debate on whether or not all Tezos grantees should be making their software open source because many features of TzScan also were not, and eventually fizzled out for the most part as they decided to change their Liquidity license to a free one, even if still not MIT." * In the blog post Tezos Commons Foundation claimed: "The main Tezos engineers who were originally at OCamlPro are now working at Nomadic Labs, not OCamlPro." ''The post also mentioned: ''"They did not create OCaml." * The post also goes on claiming OcalmPro and Starchain are forking for money: "This alleged email evidence, read in full here, suggests that Dune protocol is not a principled hard fork. Starchain Capital describes a liquidation event planned for later this year. What is described as an opportunity is set up to provide a quick turnaround for investors and OCamlPro leadership. Projection: Low: day1, the fork captures 5% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$50m valuation (liquidity event) Middle: day1, the fork captures 20% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$200m valuation (liquidity event) Good: day1, the fork captures 40% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$400m valuation (liquidity event)" Foundation's reaction on the Dune fork * On 17-6-2019 Tezos Commons announced: "Tezos Foundation to give away ledger Nano S wallets to all fundraiser contributors for the celebration of 1 year launch" * From this reddit post by TzLibre: "This announcement was sent on Jun 17th via email to 30K contributors, the very same day someone posted on Reddit the bombshell unofficial announcement of Dune. Tezos Stiftung is trying to distract contributors from this news, which is a perfect example of their total failure as managers." Tezos Protocol Team, investors, etc. * There are two legal entities behind the project: Dynamic Ledger Solutions, Inc. (DLS) and the Tezos Foundation (the Foundation) located in Zug. DLS is a US-based company currently controlled by its founders Kathleen and Arthur Breitman. It owns all of the Tezos-related intellectual property (IP), including the source code of the Tezos ledger, logos, trademark applications and domain names, as well as relationships with several contractors and a potential customer-base. The Foundation is a Swiss foundation founded in Zug in May, 2017. As a legal entity, it operates independently from DLS, though DLS advises the Foundation closely on technology. * The current DLS team working on Tezos’ includes 11 people, 10 of them are core developers. The team is headed by Arthur Breitman and Kathleen Breitman who are the two shareholders of DLS (not confirmed by the team at the moment of publication). * Breitman, Arthur; (LinkedIn, Github) graduated from the New York University with a degree in financial mathematics. His latest professional activities before Tezos were related to strategy development and market making, including posts of Vice President at Morgan Stanley, Associate at Goldman Sachs, and Portfolio Manager at White Bay Group. * Breitman, Kathleen; also the New York University graduate, also worked for several large companies. She worked among other as Strategy Associate at R3 CEV that leads a consortium of about 80 financial institutions who explore the application of blockchain in global financial services, at the consulting company Accenture, and as Management Associate at the investment firm Bridgewater Associates. * Jacob Arluck; from TQ Group * 'Martin' * The developers are primarily located in Paris (Nomadic Labs), France, and has been working through a partnership with OCamlPro (website, Github), a software company founded by Fabrice Le Fessant (one of the team members). * Roman Schnider; The co-creator of PricewaterhouseCooper (PWC) Switzerland’s blockchain initative is joining the Tezos Foundation as the newly appointed CFO and Head of Operations * Stephen Andrews; "a widely respected contributor to the Tezos ecosystem" ''who got a grant to start TezosTech. * Alexander Eichhorn; creator of TzStats; the first analytics-powered block explorer for Tezos. Advisors * Miller, Andrew; advisor * Wilcox, Zooko, advisor * Gün Sirer, Emin; advisor * Jill Carlson; advisor (still as of 8-2019) Stakers * From (3-12-2019) this The Block article: ''"With one decision to give its retail customers access to its staking service, Coinbase became the second-largest validator on Tezos virtually overnight" * Binance is (3-12-2019) the 6th largest validator on Tezos, excluding Foundation Bakers. * Stake.fish is a Staker Investors * Early backers - Ten entities: three hedge funds with a focus on tokens and seven high net-worth individuals, or federations thereof - Backed the DLS team from September 2016 through March 2017 - Total early funding from them amounted to $612,000 * Part of portofolio (as of 8-2019) at: Winklevoss Capital Management, Draper Associates, Meltem Demirors * Latin American bank BTG Pactual and asset manager Dalma Capital announced that they will be using the Tezos blockchain to launch security token offerings (STOs). The banks said the deal will be worth well over $1 billion when all existing and prospective token issuances are completed. Tezos Foundation * Aka "The Foundation" * Maintains the code and pays developers Money related * Tezos conducted an ICO from June 28, 2017 to July 13, 2017, in which 65,681 BTC and 361,122 ETH were raised. In return, 607,489,040 XTZ allocated for ICO participants were created at genesis. On top of the initial genesis supply, an additional ~76.3 million XTZ will be created for the Tezos Foundation and DLS (Dynamic Ledger Solutions). The XTZ that will be created and allocated to the Foundation and DLS is subject to a 4-year vesting schedule with monthly cliffs. This will create an aggregate allocated supply of 763,306,929 XTZ. * According to this podcast (6-2019) the Foundation has been very generous in giving funding to multiple foundations and labs around the world who built on upgrades and projects. TQ Group, Nomadic Labs (in Paris and which has upgraded protocols and is proposing other upgrades), a number foundations in Asia (With funding for the Tezos Korea, Tezos Japan and the Tezos South-East Asia) and a foundation in the USA (Tezos Commons Foundation). Cryptium Labs (a baker which has experience with work on the core protocol of Cosmos and is now also upgrading protocols on Tezos). * It announced funding for TezTech, a Tezos focused software shop with several projects underway, including a trustless scaling and custody solution, as well as APIs and software libraries. * The Tezos Foundation, has put 1 million XTZ, currently (8-2019) worth around $1.18M, into a cryptocurrency treasure hunt run by Satoshi’s Treasure; Satoshi's Treasure was also behind the competition for $1M of Bitcoin that started back in April 2019 Critiques * Critiques summed up in this reddit thread: "lack of transparency: wages & perks per foundation member, pwc audit publication, where is it?, grants in terms of usd, which partnerships with corporations, Olaf out of the foundation, no communication...poor website, no marketing such YT channels, udemy classes...and so on. Well not sure the list is exhaustive, work in progress and obviously lack of liquidity which is big..." Team, partnerships of The Tezos Foundation * Ryan Jesperson; ex president of the Foundation (as of 2-2018 but left 2-2020). He claimed he had finished what he 'came to do' which was "get the Foundation back on track and the second was to help, along with the rest of the Tezos community, to move the Tezos project forward." "To ensure a smooth transition, the Foundation Council has formed a Nomination Committee which consists of Hubertus Thonhauser, Alexis Bonte, Ryan Lackey, and Ulrich Sauter. In coming weeks, the Committee will release additional information regarding the criteria and process that will be followed to select the next Foundation Chair. " * The previous president of the foundation, Johann Gevers, stepped down in February (2018), after a tenure in which many viewed him as stifling the launch of a protocol that set a record for the largest initial coin offering (ICO) of all time up that point – $232 million in July 2017. Since Jesperson took over, along with a completely new board, the foundation has partnered with major auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers; actively funded academics, community members and entrepreneurs with interest in contributing to the ecosystem and set up the first set of validation nodes on which to launch the network. The day after Gevers stepped down TzLibre was announced as an alternative. * Michel Mauny; "Michel is Chief Scientific Officer at Nomadic Labs, on leave from Inria (the French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics), where he was a senior researcher and more recently Chief Executive Officer of the Inria Foundation. Michel’s scientific interests are mainly in the fields of programming languages: design, implementation, semantics, static analysis, and type systems. After his Ph.D. at Paris-Diderot University, Michel joined Inria in 1985 and worked on programming languages with the research group that designed and developed OCaml, the functional programming language used to implement Tezos, and the Coq proof assistant. From 1989 to 2005, Michel led the research team that further developed OCaml." * Marylène Micheloud * Lars Haussmann * Hubertus Thonhauser * Roman Schnider; The co-creator of PricewaterhouseCooper (PWC) Switzerland’s blockchain initative is joining the Tezos Foundation as the newly appointed CFO and Head of Operations * As a legal entity, it operates independently from DLS, though DLS advises the Foundation closely on technology. * "Olaf"; but he is not in the foundation anymore. Tezos Commons Foundation Basics * Tezos Commons Foundation (“TCF”) * Not to be confused with the Tezos Foundation * "The Tezos Commons Foundation is a U.S.-based non-profit corporation that will play an active role in the advancement of the Tezos project by sponsoring meetups, educational programs, and other initiatives focused on empowering the Tezos community. Projects * "In collaboration with Zastrin, learn to build a simple voting application on Tezos. This program is sponsored by Tezos Commons and is open to the community at no cost. This 5 part program is self paced and requires no prior blockchain development experience." Team * Craig Deveau; President, Board Member * Stephen Andrews; Vice President, Board Member (from TezTech) * Corey Soreff; Board Member * Nithin Neapen; Board Member * Shaun Belcher; Executive Director Investors * Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation TezTech Basics * The Tezos Foundation announced (7-2018) funding for TezTech, a Tezos focused software shop with several projects underway, including a trustless scaling and custody solution, as well as APIs and software libraries. The Tezos Foundation is pleased to announce that it will issue a grant to Stephen Andrews to establish TezTech, a global Tezos software development studio. Stephen is a widely respected contributor to the Tezos ecosystem. Some of his work includes TezBox, a multi-platform, dApp friendly wallet for Tezos, and BakeChain, a service that allows its users to bake (“validate”) on the Tezos network without having to install and maintain a full node. In addition to these two projects, the TezTech team will continue to work on: # eztz.js – a Javascript library for interacting with the Tezos blockchain. # fi – a high-level smart contract language for Tezos that compiles to Michelson. # tzToken – a sub-token standard for Tezos. # TezRPC – an RPC API that offers free access to the Tezos blockchain by providing infrastructure for developers and users. # Velos – a proposed off-chain, trustless scaling method for Tezos. # This grant also supports TezTech’s initial research and development of “Sona,” a decentralized identity protocol on Tezos. Sona will allow users to maintain control over their identities and seeks to be extremely modular as a way to provide value-added services to end users. * Has not delivered any of the products yet (8-2019) according to their website Products * On the website as of 8-2019 * TezBox was started shortly after the ICO (7-2017), and was the first available GUI wallet on the betanet. TezBox has two completed security audits (one from LeastAuthority), and was supported by the Cryptonomic team in the early days. * Velos Network is a proposed idea to scale transaction throughput on Tezos, similar to Lightning for Bitcoin. Velos Network integrates a 3rd party "gateway" as a trusted middleman, bound by an on-chain smart contract which penalizes bad actors. Read the paper here. * Sona is a proposed idea to develop a decentralized, self-sovereign identity deployed on the Tezos protocol. Sona will encompass identity verification, on-chain relationship management, private data storage and wallet management with a method to recover your identity if a private key is compromised or lost. Team * Stephen Andrews; "is a Tezos developer with ten years experience in web, mobile and blockchain development." * Mac Stevenson Yap; "is a professional designer and UI/UX expert, with experience in mobile and web design." Tezos South-East Asia Basics * Based in Singapore, "TSA will play an active role in the growth of the Tezos ecosystem by educating individuals and groups throughout Southeast Asia about Tezos and its technology. TSA will host meetups, sponsor educational programs, and support other initiatives to further develop a vibrant and empowered Tezos community in Southeast Asia and advance the project overall." Team * Caleb Kow; Director (Founder of Tezos ID, and on the board of Tezos Korea) Investors * Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation to support the establishment of Tezos Southeast Asia (“TSA”). Tezos Korea Basics * "Tezos Korea Foundation will work within their respective locales to promote the Tezos protocol and educate developers, enthusiasts, and the greater business community about its technology." Team * Jin-Hwa Kim; Director of Korea Blockchain Association, Co-Founder of Korbit * Ho-Seok Jung; Lawyer of Seum Lawfirm. Advisory lawyer of Huobi Korea, Hashed, Mediblock * Caleb Kow; Founder of Tezos ID, Director of TSA (Tezos South-East Asia Association) Investors * Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation Tezos Japan * "Tezos Japan Foundation will work within their respective locales to promote the Tezos protocol and educate developers, enthusiasts, and the greater business community about its technology." * Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation Category:Coins/Tokens